Efforts taken by manufacturing companies to meet the increasing demand for productvariety often lead to a proliferation of subassemblies. In this paper, we show that carefuldesign of product assembly sequence helps create generic subassemblies that reducesubassembly proliferation and the cost of offering product variety. This approach ofdesigning the assembly sequence to maximize the benefit from commonality ofcomponents and assembly operations, referred to as product family-based assemblysequence design, is the focus of this paper. After introducing the approach with a simpleexample, we formalize the notion of generic subassemblies, and present an algorithmicapproach to identify generic subassemblies. We illustrate the algorithm with an examplefrom the literature of an assembly from industry, and provide computational test results ofthe complexity and benefits of product family-based assembly sequence design.
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